Collective Experience of Political Violence as Identity

Abstract

French

At the beginning of the Second World War, the Canadian government forcibly removed Canadians of Japanese ancestry from their homes in British Columbia. During and immediately following their internment, many Japanese Canadians converted to Christianity. Drawing upon ethnographic fieldwork among aging Japanese Canadians, this article contextualizes the wartime conversion to Christianity in the wider sociocultural milieu of the 1940s. Discussing contemporary participation of Japanese Canadians in both Buddhist and Christian services in a long-term care facility, this paper suggests that the radical segregation and racialization of this group during wartime gave rise to a collective identity of Japanese Canadians irrespective of their religious affiliation.

Keywords

Japanese Canadians citizenship identity religion war conversion Christianity

All those people! When they find out that my parents were Nisei, they ask me: “So which camps were your parents in?” – anonymous Sansei in Toronto, Ontario

Introduction

Emma Kishida (pseudonym) is a fair-skinned, gentle-mannered Japanese Canadian woman who lives in a long-term care facility for the elderly in an industrial city located in southern Ontario, Canada.¹ In her old age, she is attractive but maintains a reserved attitude towards a stranger like myself who volunteers at this facility run by the city. A dozen elderly Japanese Canadians make this 720-bed facility their home. Both the United Church of Canada and the Pure Land Buddhist congregations provide a luncheon service to the residents of Japanese descent once a month on different Wednesdays.

Today, it is the Buddhist congregation’s turn to serve lunch. At 11 a.m., a Buddhist service begins promptly in the chapel. The chapel is a makeshift ritual space. As in every typical Canadian city, Christianity is the dominant religious tradition of the recent past. A simple, wooden cross adorns the wall behind the altar table, giving a Protestant feel to the place. There are some small Buddhist ritual paraphernalia on the altar, signifying that it is a Buddhist ritual space, at least for the time being. I wonder if the architect of this building ever imagined the space being used by anybody other than Christians. The Buddhist altar piece sitting atop a Christian Eucharistic table ironically symbolizes how Japanese Canadians have had to live within the dominant Christian social milieu of Canada throughout their lives.

Emma is one of several members of the United Church of Canada who lives in this building. She is also one of those who attend monthly Buddhist services regularly. In fact, the majority of the participants of Buddhist services also regularly attend Christian services. Emma is in no way an exception. The service is conducted in Japanese despite the fact that the majority of the participants are second generation Japanese Canadians who cannot fully understand the Japanese language. After the service, volunteers help the residents in wheelchairs move to the auditorium where other volunteers set the table for lunch. When I arrive in the auditorium, two other Japanese Canadian residents are at the table. One is Ted Kawasaki. These two do not attend religious services, but partake in the Japanese lunch. I ask the residents, in particular those who attend both the United Church and the Buddhist services, what it is like for them to attend two different religious gatherings. Emma answers with a tone of indifference: “I don’t mind coming down [to attend Buddhist services]. It’s only downstairs.” While some residents attend both Christian and Buddhist services, I notice that the core members serving lunch today are the same Japanese Canadian volunteers from the Christian outreach lunch. The main difference between the two lunches is that the president of the Buddhist congregation and the Buddhist minister are present today.

How are we to understand the present-day participation of Japanese Canadians in both Christian and Buddhist services? Is this an example of religious pluralism? Or, is it an example of religious tolerance? Based on two years of ethnographic fieldwork among a Japanese ethnic congregation of the United Church of Canada, this article explores the question of religious identity among the Nisei,² or second generation Japanese Canadians, who underwent four years of internment during World War II. At the beginning of the Second World War, the federal government forcibly removed Canadians of Japanese ancestry from their homes in British Columbia, acting on “white” Canadians’ fear of “enemy aliens” living in their own communities. The majority of second generation Japanese Canadians I encountered through my research directly experienced this tragedy.

Looking at power as an important constitutive element of social constructions (Foucault, 1983), this article will focus on both overt and covert discrimination that Japanese Canadians faced and its repercussions on their construction of identity. In the inaugural issue of the journal Identities, Nina Glick Schiller called for its contributors to critique “the hegemonic processes by which subordinated populations are distinguished as exotic, foreign, and alien and by which nations are imagined, built, and dismembered” (Schiller, 1994: 2). In the case of Canada, it conceived its own community as white, comprised of northern European stock, and overwhelmingly Christian in the first half of the 20th century. Japanese immigrants who did not fit into this imagination were, metaphorically speaking, dismembered and cut off from the corporate body of Canadian citizenry during World War II. On the part of Japanese Canadian communities, this experience of internment based on their perceived “racial” difference had a catalytic effect on their identity formation. This identity subordinates that of religious difference as Christian or Buddhist. I argue that the experience of collective tragedy that the Nisei went through during World War II solidified their sense of being as “Japanese Canadian” and gave rise to their collective identity.

In what follows, I provide a brief review of the history of Japanese Canadians, set in the context of policies in Canada, the conversion to Christianity in the 1940s, and the notion of ethnic identity among Japanese Canadians. By narrating stories of Japanese Canadians and their identity construction, this article illustrates the ways in which the exercise of power by the majority gives rise to a minority’s identity as the “other.”

Early Federal and Provincial Policies and Discrimination against Japanese Canadians

Although Canada maintains a strikingly multicultural and multiethnic society today, it had a decisively Euro-centred vision of a nation state in the first half of the twentieth century. Through my fieldwork, I have witnessed multiple ways that this Euro-centred vision of the nation state harmed a number of Japanese Canadians’ sense of well-being. Up until 1967, the Canadian government maintained a list of the preferred nationalities of immigrants. This list included the following nationalities: people from the United States, the British Isles, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Germany, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Iceland. As one can see, the list even excludes southern and eastern Europeans, who, at the time, were considered to be “unsuited” (Weinfeld and Wilkinson, 1999). Based on the Canadian authorities’ notion of the “imagined community,” Canada removed Canadians of Japanese ancestry from their homes on the West Coast and incarcerated them during World War II. The resentful feelings borne by those who were interned are often hidden in their silence or implicit gestures of indignation, but not in the words of John Kawasaki. Until I heard John’s words, I did not realize how much the Nisei were hurt.

John is the younger brother of Ted, whom we encountered earlier. Ted did not participate in the Buddhist service, but came to partake in the Japanese lunch. John, his younger brother, is a member of the United Church of Canada, and I came to know him through my fieldwork conducted among the Japanese ethnic congregation on Sundays. He volunteers as a community photographer, taking photographs of children for the parish, and makes dessert whenever he can for the tea fellowship gatherings held in his own parish. John was born in British Columbia, but was forced to move east of the Rockies, just like many others of his fellow Japanese Canadians. He has spent all his life in Canada and has never been to Japan. He told me that even sixty years after the war, he still does not feel entitled to be a “real Canadian” because of the war. He said:

I still don’t consider myself a real Canadian because we are colored. I know for years, I was asked: “Where were you born?” If you’re white, you would not be asked that. Some hakujin [lit. “white people”]³ comes up to me: “Where were you born? You speak English very well.” I said “I should hope so.” […] “May I ask you what nationality are you?” I said “Canadian,” “No, no, no, I don’t mean that.” I’d like to say that I am Canadian, but the mainstream, they don’t consider me as Canadian because of the color. […] It was the war. That was it. We were not Canadian.

John’s sense of being discriminated against is remarkably raw. He spoke about the sense of assault as if it had happened yesterday.⁴ To contextualize John’s painful expression, I now turn to the history of Japanese Canadians from their arrival in Canada in the late nineteenth century to their experience as Canada’s “enemy aliens” during World War II.

The year 1877 is considered to be the year in which the first Japanese person arrived in Canada (Shinpo, 1977: 30). During the initial period of Japanese migration, there were relatively fewer restrictions on coming to Canada, and the Japanese started arriving on the West Coast for fishery and other economic opportunities. The Japanese population started to increase in the 1890s, and by 1907, there were 7,990 Japanese people living in Canada.⁵ The overwhelming majority of Japanese lived in the westernmost province of British Columbia, and within that population, fishery was the most common trade. Gradually, with the increase of the Japanese population, Japan Town was formed in Vancouver, and Nisei children grew up speaking English as their first language.

Although Canadians of European heritage needed inexpensive labour and willingly employed Japanese and other Asian populations, white Canadians were wary of the increasing number of those who looked unfamiliar and whose language and customs differed widely from their own. Soon, this fear of the unknown turned into a political act. In August 1907, the Anti-Asiatic Exclusionists’ League, which had been set up in San Francisco a few years earlier, established its Vancouver branch in Canada (Shinpo, 1977: 70). The League quickly attracted about 2,000 members, including the most powerful segments of society such as the mayor of the city, lawyers, and doctors. Some participants in this League’s demonstrations attacked China Town and parts of Japan Town in Vancouver in 1907. After this attack, Japan and Canada agreed to restrict the number of Japanese immigrants to Canada for the purpose of earning wages, by issuing only 400 visas a year (Shinpo, 1977: 73).

Meanwhile, in the province of British Columbia, community members continued to suffer from systematic discrimination in the areas of employment, politics, and education. As British subjects of Asiatic descent, Japanese Canadians were not permitted to vote for political representatives, take up employment relating to pharmaceutical products or law, or obtain any positions in provincial offices. Hence, they were not even allowed to enter the pharmacology department or attend law school at the University of British Columbia (Shinpo, 1977: 113). These are only a few examples of the structural constraints imposed on them, and the list of prohibitions was extensive (Shinpo, 1977).

With the outbreak of World War II, this discrimination accelerated. The government immediately ordered the closure of Japanese language schools, banned the publication of Japanese newspapers, and impounded Japanese fishing vessels. The federal government announced the removal of Japanese Canadians from the “Protected Area,” which was within 100 miles to the east of the coastal line. Initially, those who did not live in Vancouver were incarcerated in the grounds of Hastings Park located in the National Exhibition Buildings. This is where John was incarcerated as soon as the rounding up of Japanese Canadians had begun. Women and children, in particular, were placed in the Livestock Building of Hastings Park where cattle were originally housed (Oikawa, 2012: 118). During my research, community members were willing to tell me, without my soliciting such information, that John was one of those Japanese Canadians placed in Hastings Park.

Approximately 22,000 or 90% of Japanese Canadians were forced to move under this program. The United Church Nisei members I met throughout my research were almost all interned prior to coming to Ontario. Which member was placed in which camp was openly shared, and sometimes people told me which camp they were at. There were several destinations for forced removal: “relocation centres” in the interior of British Columbia, road camps, “self-support” camps, and sugar beet farms in the provinces of Alberta and Manitoba. Some were also sent to prisoner-of-war camps in Ontario (Oikawa, 2012: 3).⁶ Japanese Canadians had to sell their property and belongings at unreasonably low prices within a short period of time (Shinpo, 1977; Stanger-Ross, 2014). What is more, they had to use what little monies they received from the sale of their own property to support themselves in the internment camps (Oikawa, 2012).

Towards the end of the war in 1945, Japanese Canadians were required to sign a “repatriation survey” choosing between two options: to move to an uncertain location to the east of the Rocky Mountains or to move to the war ravaged country of Japan. In 1946, almost 4,000 were deported to Japan, of which 66% were Canadian citizens (Oikawa, 2012: 4). Many of my research participants chose to move to Ontario, and subsequently rebuild their lives from the ground. Both John and his brother Ted married Japanese Canadian Nisei women and made families in Ontario in the post-war era.

In order to approach the question of the Nisei’s current participation in both Buddhist and Christian services, I turn now to the more focused view of their religious practices in relation to the two traditions involved.

Conversion to Christianity and Identity Politics

Japanese Canadians had to be associated with both Buddhism and Christianity in one way or another—be it community members’ funerals, friends’ weddings, or even through English language classes. These two religions are the ones historically sanctioned by the two nation states with which these people are most affiliated: Buddhism in Japan and Christianity in Canada.⁷ Those who are Buddhists and Christians may be from the same family. For example, Emma is related to another Nisei woman Sheila Hamada, who organizes the volunteers for the Buddhist outreach luncheons. Some Japanese Canadians changed their religious affiliation at the time of their marriage—from Buddhism to Christianity⁸—so that she or he would be affiliated with a religious tradition of a certain ie, or the lineage of the households—inspired by a practice seen in Japan.

Let me turn now to history. When the first waves of Japanese immigrants arrived in British Columbia in the late 19th century, the majority of them belonged to Pure Land Buddhist temples in Japan.⁹ First and second generation Japanese Canadians maintained their ties to Buddhist temples by sending donations to their home temples in Japan or inviting overseas missionaries to come to Canada from Japan. Gradually, several Buddhist temples were built in the province of British Columbia, providing essential community services such as funeral rites, children’s schooling, and space for community events (McLellan, 1999).

While the Issei, or the first generation, were more at home in the Buddhist cultural milieu, many Nisei children were attending Sunday schools offered by Christian churches. There were at least two Japanese “ethnic churches” in Vancouver, which belonged to the United Church of Canada. Many of my Nisei research participants attended Sunday schools at these churches although their parents were neither members of the church nor Christians in faith. When John told me about his conversion in an internment camp, he mentioned that he received baptism from the same pastor he knew from his Sunday school in Vancouver. The Issei themselves kept strictly to the legal prohibition against work on Sundays so as not to provide unnecessary grounds for discrimination (Shinpo, 1977). For the Issei who worked extremely hard during weekdays, these Sunday schools must have been received as welcome free childcare. In this way, by the time the Issei and Nisei were sent to relocation camps in the interior of British Columbia, many Japanese Canadians had acquired some familiarity with Christian churches.

In contextualizing the lives of my research participants, I should stress that Canadian society has been first and foremost Christian. The concept of multiculturalism was only introduced in the 1970s, and Canadian demography achieved its contemporary ethnic diversity only after immigration policy was changed in 1967. According to the 1996 census, 46% of Canadians think that “traditional Christian values” should play a major role in Canadian politics (Lyon, 2000). As this census suggests, there has been a deeply entrenched tradition of Christian influence in Canadian society. In the 20th century, in particular, politics and religion were intimately intertwined. The alliance between Protestants and British civilization resulted in Anglo-Protestant hegemony in mainstream Canadian society, and this hegemony lasted until the end of World War II. Lyon (2000) observes that nationality itself was interpreted with evangelical referents, and Clarke (1996) notes that Canadian Protestants were fervently nationalistic. Historians suggest that during this period the Protestant and Anglo alliance envisioned Canada as God’s Dominion (Christie and Gauvreau, 1996; Lyon, 2000). There was also an ultramontane Catholic hegemony in the province of Quebec (Lyon, 2000), which meant that the Christian domination of Canadian society was an undeniable social and political reality.

The strong presence of Protestant churches in the political arena during wartime is reflected in the government’s initial plan to place Japanese Canadians in different camps according to their denominational affiliation (Kawano, 1998; Shinpo, 1977: 154). Originally, each denomination placed their representative in their designated camp, and parishioners were encouraged to contact their own representative to arrange for their family to be sent to the appropriate camp. In the Interior of British Columbia, ghost towns were converted to camps: Kaslo for the United Church, Slocan for the Anglicans, Greenwood for Roman Catholics and so on. In implementing the “relocation” of Japanese Canadians in haste, the government failed to implement the original plan to intern Japanese Canadians on the basis of their denominational differences. However, many families that I spoke to who identified as Buddhist at the time of war were interned in the largest camp called Tashme, where the living environment was particularly demanding. This place was also designated, according to my research participants, for those who were willing to “repatriate” to Japan. On the other hand, one longstanding Christian family from Vancouver was interned in a smaller camp where the living conditions were relatively less severe in comparison. Overtly and covertly, Nisei received the message that Christianity was a desirable quality for them as residents of Canada.

Many of my Nisei research participants admitted that they were baptized as Christians during their internment or immediately after the war when they were forced to move to the eastern part of Canada. Examining the period of 1941 to 1951, Mark Mullins notes that this is the period in which Christian missionaries had great success in gaining converts among Japanese Canadians. According to the Census of Canada, the “Japanese population” who identified with one of the major Christian denominations (United Church, Anglican, and Roman Catholic) increased from 30.5% to 56.7% (Mullins, 1989: 26). Whereas 64% identified themselves as Buddhist in 1941, almost 57% identified themselves with one of the three denominations of Christian churches¹⁰ in Canada in 1951. After World War II, therefore, Christianity became the most common religion among Japanese Canadians.

Robert Hefner has argued that conversion to Christianity is often influenced by “a larger interplay of identity, politics, and morality” (Hefner, 1993: 4). This theoretical model seems relevant to the Nisei’s conversion to Christianity. Having been stripped of all existing privileges, the Japanese Canadian experienced what Victor Turner calls a liminal space (1995) during the war. Their properties were confiscated, children were removed from school, and adults had their employment taken from them. Although Canada had many Issei veterans from the First World War, for the most part, the federal government also denied Japanese Canadians the right to join the armed forces during the Second World War. In relocation camps, many Nisei were forced to re-conceptualize who they were. Many of the Nisei with whom I spoke said that up until the internment, they had never seen so many Japanese Canadians. They had to face the racialization of their group at first hand, being physically set apart as the “other.” When faced with the denial of their rightful existence by their own government, Japanese Canadians had to grapple with the question of identity.

I speculate with regard to whether the moral dislocation that the Nisei felt intensified in internment camps. As the first generation born to Japanese immigrant families in Canada, Nisei faced a gap between the moral framework of their Issei parents and that of the larger Canadian society. Many of their cultural practices and the moral systems that they learned from the Issei Japanese community were not necessarily understandable from the standpoint of mainstream Canadian society. For example, the arranged marriages of Japanese Issei immigrants—men receiving brides from Japan whom they knew only from photographs—were criticized by white Canadian society as a barbaric practice, analogous to the slave trade (Makabe, 1995).

Many Issei were reluctant to show any signs of ill feeling regarding their mistreatment by the Canadian government—thanks to the moral education of the Japanese Meiji government. Ken Adachi, a Nisei writer, points out that hitoni meiwaku wo kakete wa ikenai (“one must not make a nuisance of oneself to other people”) was often quoted as “a cardinal principle of morality” among Issei Japanese Canadians at the time (Adachi, 1976: 225). Adachi also notes that enryo (restraint) and gaman (forbearance) were other major ethical concepts that the Issei embraced, and contributed to the general tendency of the Issei to submit meekly to the government’s mistreatment (Adachi, 1976). One needs to remember, however, that the Issei had been brought up in Japan during a time when the Japanese government was striving hard to establish an empire, busily making its citizens into loyal patriotic subjects of the empire (Hardacre, 1989). These ethical values—such as the requirement not to become a nuisance to others, to practice restraint, and to maintain one’s forbearance—were carefully chosen by the Ministry of Education in the Meiji Period (Yamashita, 1996), and children learned these values through their school curriculum in Japan. Not knowing the different ethical education the Issei had received in Japan, Adachi harshly criticizes the Issei who did not stand up for their rights (Adachi, 1976: 225). Caught between the world of their Issei parents and the world of English-speaking Canada, the Nisei were torn between two dissimilar types of worldview and ethos.

During the four years of internment, eighty-nine Japanese Canadians converted to the United Church of Canada at the largest camp, called Tashme (Kawano, 1997: 70). Considering this was the number for only one denomination at one location, it suggests that the overall number of converts to Christianity in various relocation camps in total was significantly higher. John Kawasaki recalled his experience of converting to Christianity in Tashme as follows:

I got baptized in Tashme. I was baptized by Rev. McWilliams, the same pastor who used to teach us Sunday school [in Vancouver]. […] Well, there were a bunch of us, […], must have been ten of us … The missionary said “Why don’t you all get baptized?” because he knew that we were going to be scattered after the war. We knew about Christianity. I knew a lot about it. They did wonderful things for us. So I thought, sure, why not be a Christian? And, I got baptized.

In this narrative, the reader can trace John’s familiarity with Christianity. He knew the pastor from his Vancouver days, and he used to attend Sunday school although he was not officially a Christian. I’ll come back to the “wonderful things” John referred to in the later section of this paper.

The period in which many Nisei decided to receive baptism coincided with the time when the Canadian government conducted a so-called “repatriation survey.” In many ways, this survey forced Japanese Canadians to question their identity: Are you Japanese or Canadian? Although many Nisei preferred to stay in Canada—which is not a surprise when the majority of them did not speak Japanese fluently at all—some Nisei reluctantly chose the deportation option, in deference to the Issei’s sentiment with regard to their native country. A large number of families, however, later requested that the Canadian government cancel their earlier decision to be deported to Japan (Shinpo, 1977: 187).

Although Buddhism was not banned outright, it faced many challenges during wartime, and it was, in reality, discouraged by the Canadian government. Few Buddhist ministers were allowed to accompany Japanese internees (Ichikawa, 1994).¹¹ Buddhist temples were closed, and the ministers themselves were sent to be interned or to work on road camps (McLellan, 1999). There were clear messages that “assimilation” is the only way to gain respect from the wider Canadian society.

The idea of “assimilation” seemed to be actively discussed among Japanese Canadians themselves at the time. Some Japanese Canadians thought Buddhists were detrimental to full assimilation (Ichikawa, 1994), and that if they did not have Buddhist groups, Japanese Canadians as a collective would not be discriminated against so much (McLellan, 1999: 47). Religious affiliation to Christianity was a major element in the identity politics and clearly considered to be an effective way to demonstrate that Japanese Canadians were “one of us” in Canada.

Another tactic taken up by Japanese Canadians in their identity politics is that, at the time of their conversion to Christianity, they picked English names for their baptism. They have continued to use these names in their everyday lives. Nisei often have Japanese first names, but the majority of them are called by English names. With conversion to Christianity, the Nisei resolutely took on new identities—both as Christian citizens of Canada and as the bearers of English first names. These identities, after all, were far more understandable and consonant with the standpoint of the wider Anglo-Protestant Canadian society.

In explaining their conversion to Christianity, however, many Nisei emphasize that they converted because missionaries helped them, and that they knew Christianity was good. In the relocation camps, many Nisei also felt indebted to the missionaries’ dedication to teaching the high school curriculum. During the time when the province of British Columbia refused to provide Japanese Canadian youths with education, many Nisei recall warmly that the missionaries stepped in to ensure their well-being. A number of United Church missionaries evangelizing in Japan were sent back to Canada around this time because of the precarious situation overseas, and several of these missionaries volunteered to teach Japanese Canadian youths in relocation camps.

The United Church minister W.R. McWilliams, who was assigned to Tashme, recalls that a group of youths came to ask him if there was any way to create an avenue for high school education. The kindergarten and elementary school education were available, but no education was made available for those who were between 14 and 15 years old. According to McWilliams, the Home Mission Board and the Women’s Missionary Society of the United Church of Canada had responded to this request, and organized night classes. Nisei worked on correspondence study with the help of missionaries, and the British Columbia Department of Education provided the students with credits they needed. The pastor’s room was converted and used as the classroom for elementary school during the day, high school at night, and the place of worship on Sundays (McWilliams, 1961: 106).

Tom Ohsawa repeated his gratitude to the missionaries:

During the war, we were in the camp and the United Church missionaries came to help us, because the B.C. government did not give us an education. So United Church people made an arrangement with B.C. They helped out in our schooling. That’s how I got grade 9, part of 8, part of 10. […] They taught us all the good things. That’s what Christianity is.

Although I did not clearly understand the nuance of “good things” which Tom mentioned, McWilliams’ writing is yet again helpful in contextualizing this statement of a Nisei. The term “good things” refers to the intervention to procure much needed education of the Japanese youth. The “wonderful thing” mentioned earlier by John Kawasaki points to the same incident. McWilliams describes the time when these young Japanese Canadians came to receive baptism. He notes that many of these people said that they had not understood the church, but they came to understand what the church was about through its work (McWilliams, 1961: 108).

John told me how his exploration of Buddhism ended with a Buddhist youth group in the camp:

The main reason that I got back to the United Church [from the Buddhist youth group is because] the missionaries taught us high school … The United Church missionaries helped us out.

As repeatedly narrated by several others, Japanese Canadian Nisei were profoundly indebted to the missionaries—and by extension to Christian churches—which were one of only a few social institutions that advocated for the welfare of Japanese Canadians during the war. Shinpo notes that there were only two social groups who advocated on behalf of Japanese Canadians. One was the CCF (Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, which later developed into the New Democratic Party) and the other was the alliance of Christian churches that were altruistically motivated (Shinpo, 1977: 183). It was also McWilliams who advised Japanese Canadians not to choose an option to be deported, in their “repatriation survey”; according to Shinpo, McWilliams insisted, in the Japanese language, that Japanese Canadians remain in Canada. He knew that Japan was completely devastated from the war, and that it would be for the benefit of Japanese Canadians to remain in Canada (Shinpo, 1977: 186).

In theorizing Japanese Canadians’ conversion to Christianity in the 1940s, therefore, Hefner’s idea that conversion was often motivated by a larger interplay of identity, politics and morality seems useful. In the liminal space of the internment camps, the Nisei were forced to think about who they were. Despite their citizenship as Canadian, the Canadian identity was not honoured by their own government. As Christian missionaries demonstrated their dedication to the socially marginalized, young Nisei chose to take on a Christian identity as well as being the bearers of the English names. Although these Japanese Canadians used the occasion of baptism as their expression of gratitude for the missionaries who intervened for their welfare, it is also important to situate their conversion in the constellation of power holders within Canada, of which Christian churches were a part. But, if being Christian is part of identity politics, why would one attend Buddhist services? To answer this question, I now shift my focus to their ethnic identity.

Question of Ethnic Identity as Japanese

When I asked which label seemed most appropriate to describe who they were, almost all of my research participants picked the label “Japanese Canadian” over “Christian” or “Canadian.” Although, on the surface, this choice may point to their identification with things Japanese or things that are both Japanese and Canadian, I gradually came to realize the ambiguous position which I, as a Japanese immigrant in Canada, occupy in this community. As somebody from Japan who has lived in Canada for over ten years, I share a great deal of cultural background with this community. Nevertheless, it is clear that I do not fully belong to this community. What constitutes these differences between us?

This perceived sense of difference is explicitly reflected in the ways that the community describes its internal sub-groups. As a rule, the terms Issei, Nisei, and Sansei denote first generation, second generation, and third generation respectively. However, in Canadian contexts, these terms—Issei, Nisei, and Sansei—are used exclusively for the members of the Japanese ethnic community whose families went through World War II. Those members of the community who immigrated to the country after the Immigration Act had changed in 1967 are given a separate category and they are referred to as “Shin’ijusha,” that is, literally, “New Immigrants.” Mrs Kiuchi, who immigrated from Japan in the 1960s because of her husband’s work, said laughingly: “Isn’t it funny that I am a ‘New Immigrant’ when I have lived here for more than forty years?” She is a dedicated member of the community, and in her early 70s she would otherwise fit perfectly in the demographic group of the Nisei. Knowing that she cannot claim her status as an “Issei,” Mrs Kiuchi jokes from time to time, “I am an Issei! Because I am the first generation to live here.” She says this as she laughs, with a certain irony, and the Japanese Canadians who are around her laugh with a certain sense of resignation. Both parties implicitly know that the term is not applicable to her. Mrs Kiuchi is not part of the “historical community.”

The term Nisei, as a rule, is designated for those who are the sons and daughters of the Issei who came to Canada in the late nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries. Interestingly, however, many chose to name themselves Nisei even if they were, technically speaking, the third generation in Canada, or the “two point five” generation when one of their parents came directly from Japan and the other was born in Canada. If the term does not strictly reflect the number of generations in Canada, what are the common denominators for this term? It seems that the common denominators include having Japanese parents who came directly from Japan before the Pacific War, being Canadian born oneself, and having lived through wartime discrimination and internment.

To complicate this term further, there is another modified category among the Nisei. This group is called “Kika-nisei” (literally, “returnee second generation”) and it refers to the Nisei who went to Japan and returned to Canada later for various reasons. Some of these Nisei were sent to Japan by their parents prior to the war in order to receive a Japanese education; and others moved to Japan with their family members when the Canadian government facilitated the removal of Japanese Canadians after the Pearl Harbor attack of 1941. Some of these people experienced the internment, and others did not. The Japanese Canadian community places them in a separate and modified category of “Kika-nisei” within the group of Nisei. Within the community of Japanese Canadians, the marker is clearly set. The knowledge of who is a Kika-nisei and who is not is often shared openly by the community. Some community members even mention that there can be an air of uneasiness between those who are returnee Nisei and those who are “regular” Nisei.¹²

These returnee Nisei occupy ambiguous positions within the community. To be sure, there are a wide range of Kika-nisei. Most Kika-nisei who went to Japan after the breakout of the war received a bitter welcome from their relatives in Japan, and the majority of these people tried to come back to Canada. These Kika-nisei are thus doubly marginalized: “enemy aliens” in Canada and not-genuinely-Japanese in Japan. The first person who talked to me in my fieldwork was one of these Kika-nisei. She asked me in her fluent Japanese if I preferred to speak in English or Japanese. I replied that I am fine with either language. Upon hearing my response, she said apologetically in Japanese: “Because of the war, I was taken to Japan when I was five and returned to Canada at sixteen [years of age]. So, neither my English nor my Japanese is good enough.” She said this in fluent Japanese. The gap between what she said and what she demonstrated—fluency in actual language skills and her lack of confidence in embodying those skills—caught me by surprise. I reassured her that she had an excellent command of the language. She kindly invited me to visit her neighbourhood where, according to her, many of them lived. On my first day of fieldwork, I had hardly established my trustworthiness as a researcher or as a mere visitor. I was therefore both elated at the ease of establishing rapport with community members and surprised at the eagerness with which they would talk to me about their experience. Later, I realized that her eagerness was partially rooted in her marginality within the community as a Kika-nisei.

The way these returnee Nisei were treated in Japan also became part of the shared narratives among Japanese Canadians. The Japanese phrase “nande kaette kita” (“why did you come back?”) is often quoted by Nisei as the epitome of the hostile response that the Kika-nisei received from Japanese people in Japan. During the Second World War, especially towards the end of the conflict, ordinary Japanese people in Japan faced severe food shortages. While those who did not produce food had to rely upon rationed handouts of everyday food items by the government, it is not difficult to imagine that having an extra family member to feed felt like a burden on the part of Japanese families who were already living in dire conditions of food shortages on a national scale. The community of Japanese Canadians must have repeated this episode as their own heritage, for it is very common for a Sansei who does not speak the Japanese language to be able to quote this phrase “nande kaette kita.”

As these shared narratives and the various terms that denote internal sub-groups may indicate, the ethnic origin of their parents and grandparents is not a definite criterion for their being “one of us.” Instead, it is the shared experience of systematic discrimination and subsequent recovery which constitutes the marker of identity as “one of us.” This observation resonates with the contention made by Schiller that I quoted earlier. She made a call to critique “the hegemonic processes by which subordinated populations are distinguished as exotic, foreign, and alien and by which nations are imagined, built, and dismembered” (1994: 2). In the spirit of Eleanor Leacock, who argued for the socially constructed nature of race and ethnicity in specific historical periods (Schiller, 1994), I would also like to suggest that Japanese immigrants of the pre-war period in Canada were members of a subordinated population whose existence did not fit into the picture of the “imagined community” that the dominant population of Canada shared in the first half of the twentieth century. The powerful in Canada imagined their country to be “God’s Dominion”¹³ (Bramadat, 2005: 3; Christie and Gauvreau, 1996; Lyon, 2000) and this Dominion was not only Christian, but also white, preferably Protestant, and consisted of the descendants of Northern European stock.

This experience of being set apart as an “enemy” and the “other” seems to have never left the consciousness of the Japanese Canadians who were born in the pre-war period.¹⁴ Sixty years after the wartime discrimination, this wound has never healed among many Nisei people, as is shown in the bitter feeling of John Kawasaki that I quoted earlier. Although this extremely negative experience was often times concealed and not explicitly passed down to later generations, unspoken unhappy memories were always hovering over many Japanese Canadian families (Sugiman, 2004a, 2004b).

In some other families, however, Nisei did not hesitate to pass down their memories to the next generation. A Sansei, Jeffery, speaks of his father and father’s friends: “They talked about the camp and all that all the time. But, if you think of it, it was only four years of their life!” Although this comment by one of the sons of Nisei sounds playful, and gives us the impression that he is downplaying the hardship and severity of the experience of his parents’ generation, nevertheless his comment does point to the gravity and centrality of the experience of internment among the Nisei group.

Talking about the forced dispersal to the eastern part of Canada, one of the elderly members of the Japanese United Church says that they “naturally stuck together” in a city that they did not know. Immediately after the war, the reception of Japanese Canadians by their new home cities was not enthusiastic, to say the least. The government monitored the whereabouts of Japanese Canadians up until 1949, an astonishing four years after the war had ended. Many Nisei emphasize that the first ones to employ Japanese Canadians were Jewish people, and not Anglo Canadians. In their own struggle to define who they were in a new environment, Japanese Canadians invented various ways to enjoy themselves through social networking among themselves.¹⁵ The Nisei created bowling leagues, made a basement of the church into a temporary dance club on Saturdays, and eventually created Japanese Christian churches and Buddhist temples. This tightly knit relationship was further formalized through marriages, and it has been carried over to the present day. Whether Buddhist or Christian, some of the Nisei continue to maintain friendships with their high school classmates from the internment days. In October 2004, a high school class from Tashme was holding a reunion luncheon in memory of their recently deceased, beloved teacher who was also a missionary. I should note that the tightly knit community is also a different side of the same coin: ongoing marginalization of Japanese Canadians in newly settled eastern provinces in the period immediately after the war.

Conclusion

The Nisei, whether Buddhist or Christian, consider other Issei and Nisei as comrades who underwent the hardship of systematic discrimination and its ultimate expression, the internment, together. The Issei’s and Nisei’s stories of internment and their subsequent move to the east of the Rockies have become a shared narrative of their peoplehood, and the history and memory of this past play a critical role in shaping their identity as Japanese Canadians. Labels of religious identity such as Buddhist or Christian seem almost irrelevant to this group of people. Turning to the naming of internal sub-groups among Japanese Canadians: Issei, Nisei, Kika-nisei (that is, Returnee Nisei), Sansei, and Shin’ijusha (that is, New Immigrants), one can see how the experience of the internment and its impact have thoroughly shaped the internal group dynamics and identity of these people. This article provides support for ongoing discussion about inequity and the rise of identity by demonstrating that the experience of internment has continued to shape the identity of Japanese Canadians, not only against the backdrop of the dominant Canadian society, but internally by drawing and re-drawing boundaries between social categories within the group.

While the experience of internment left significant psychological effects on second generation Japanese Canadians, Japan’s post-war rise to political and economic power in the international domain has had important implications for the ongoing identity constructions of second generation Japanese Canadians. In recent years, many have started renewing their relationships with things Japanese—by taking calligraphy classes, naming their grandchildren with characteristically Japanese names, and going to karaoke gatherings to sing Japanese enka songs. Clearly, political economy and the social status accorded to the powerful (be they British Canadians or Japanese in Japan) continue to influence the identity constructions of Japanese Canadians.

Back in the long-term care facility, the lunch is ready and residents are seated. Whereas the Christian outreach lunch is made up of homemade food brought in by the United Church members, at the Buddhist luncheon, the organizer has purchased ready-made Japanese chicken-and-egg rice bowls from a nearby city. I also notice the absence of the President of the Buddhist congregation and the priest. They usually leave so that the outreach ministry program can save some money. As I look around the table and volunteers, I can see that they are all Canadians of Japanese ancestry. The bonding which emerged from the tragedy, continues to be strong, blurring the boundaries of Christianity and Buddhism in the 21st century. Outside the chapel, there is a notice board listing the schedule of services on different days of the week: Roman Catholic, Anglican, “Japanese,” and Salvation Army. Ironically, the notice board is accurate in that it excludes the labeling of the United Church and the Pure Land Buddhism after the word “Japanese,” the very label with which their suffering originated.

Footnotes

Notes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

References

Adachi

(1976) The Enemy that Never Was: A History of the Japanese Canadians. Toronto, ON: McClelland and Stewart.

Asad

(1993) Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam. Baltimore, MD, and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press.

Bramadat

(2005) Beyond Christian Canada: Religion and ethnicity in a multicultural society. In: Bramadat

Seljak

(eds) Religion and Ethnicity in Canada. Toronto, ON: Pearson Education in Canada, pp. 1–29.

Christie

Gauvreau

(1996) A Full-Orbed Christianity: The Protestant Churches and Social Welfare in Canada, 1900–1940. Montreal & Kingston, London, and Buffalo, OH: McGill-Queen’s University Press.

Clarke

(1996) English-speaking Canada from 1854. In: Murphy

Perin

(eds) A Concise History of Christianity in Canada. Don Mills, ON: Oxford University Press, pp. 261–360.

Foucault

(1983) Michael Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, edited by Dreyfus

Rabinow

. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Hardacre

(1989) Shintō and the State, 1868–1988. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Harding

(2010) Jodo Shinshu in Southern Alberta: From rural Raymond to amalgamation. In: Harding

. (eds) Wild Geese: Buddhism in Canada. Toronto, ON: McGill-Queen’s University Press, pp. 134–167.

Hefner

(ed.) (1993) Conversion to Christianity: Historical and Anthropological Perspectives on a Great Transformation. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and Oxford: University of California Press.

10.

Ichikawa

(1994) A test of religious tolerance: Canadian government and Jodo Shinshu Buddhism during the Pacific War, 1942–1945. Canadian Ethnic Studies, 26(2): 46–69.

11.

Kawano

(ed.) (1997) Ministry to the Hopelessly Hopeless: Japanese Canadian Evacuees and Churches during the WWII. Scarborough, ON: The Japanese Canadian Churches Historical Project.

12.

Kawano

(ed.) (1998) A History of the Japanese Congregations of The United Church of Canada (1892–1959): A Pathway through the People of Grace. Translated by E

Yoshida

Ariga

Kawano

. Scarborough, ON: The Japanese Canadian Christian Churches Historical Project.

13.

Lyon

(2000) Introduction. In: Lyon

Van Die

(eds) Rethinking Church, State and Modernity: Canada between Europe and America. Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press, pp. 3–19.

14.

Makabe

(1995) Picture Bride: Japanese Women in Canada. Translated by Merken

. Toronto, ON: Multicultural History Society of Ontario.

15.

McLellan

(1999) Many Petals of the Lotus: Five Asian Buddhist Communities in Toronto. Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press.

16.

McWilliams

(1961) Tashime ni okeru gōdō kyōkai [The United Church of Canada in Tashme]. In: A History of the Japanese Congregations of the United Church of Canada 1892–1959, edited by The Japanese Canadian Christian Churches Historical Project. Toronto, ON: The Japanese Canadian Christian Churches Historical Project.

17.

Miki

(2004) Redress: Inside the Japanese Canadian Call for Justice. Vancouver, BC: Raincoast Books.

18.

Mullins

(1989) Religious Minorities in Canada: A Sociological Study of the Japanese Experience. Canadian Studies Volume 4. Queenston, ON: The Edwin Mellen Press.

19.

Oikawa

(2012) Cartographies of Violence: Japanese Canadian Women, Memory, and the Subjects of the Internment. Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press.

20.

Schiller

(1994) Introducing identities: Global studies in culture and power. Identities 1(1): 1–6.

21.

Shinpo

(1977) Nihon no Imin: Nikkei Kanada-jin ni mirareta haiseki to tekiō. Tokyo: Hyōronsha.

22.

Stanger-Ross

(2014) Telling a difficult past: Kishizo Kimura’s entanglement in racist policy. B.C. Studies 181: 39–62, 170.

23.

Sugiman

(2004a) Memories of internment: Narrating Japanese Canadian women’s life stories. Canadian Journal of Sociology / Cahiers canadiens de sociologie 29(3): 359–388.

24.

Sugiman

(2004b) Passing time, moving memories: Interpreting wartime narratives of Japanese Canadian Women. Histoire Sociale / Social History 37(73): 51–79.

25.

Turner

(1995) The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. New York: Aldine de Gruyter.

26.

Watada

(2010) Looking East: Japanese Canadians and Jodo Shinshu Buddhism, 1905–1976. In: Harding

. (eds) Wild Geese: Buddhism in Canada. Toronto, ON: McGill-Queen’s University Press, pp. 62–83.

27.

Weinfeld

Wilkinson

(1999) Immigration, diversity, and minority communities. In: Li

(ed.) Race and Ethnic Relations in Canada. Toronto, ON: Oxford University Press, pp. 55–87.

28.

Yamashita

(1996) Confucianism and the Japanese State, 1904–1945. In: Ming

(ed.) Confucian Traditions in East Asian Modernity: Moral Education and Economic Culture in Japan and the Four Mini-Dragons. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, pp. 132–154.